Day # 96 of the Kitchen Renovation

Yeah! My oven is 'in' and working.... what a joyous occasion. I have finally been able to cook lasagne: Nanda egg noodles, bolognese made with both pork and beef mince and home-made tomato puree and a bechamel, fragrant with nutmeg and embodied with the soft texture of ricotta... It was as good as I had anticipated. So much more to look forward to... bread tomorrow, rye bread the day after, all types of cakes...

Well, I'm back.  I've been immersed in work and my food writing course for two months now, and sadly too busy for my much loved blogg.  Too ironic for words?

My kitchen is still a work in progress, but we have progressed our manner of cooking.

We have two gas burners, a microwave oven, a turbot oven (thank you Kim), a kettle, toaster and barbecue outside.

I've started cooking again. Pizzas and home-made bread last night... Almost mastered the pizza oven.

To be doing a food writing course and not have a kitchen is frustrating.. so what have I been cooking? Old favourites, too risky to try something new.

I'm done with the food writing for the moment but back to blogging... yeah!

Passata Day

It's been 12 years since I was last involved in a Passata Day.  I tried to organise bulk tomatoes when I was first in central Australia, but it was just too hard, and too expensive.  However, while on the hunt for daikon radishes in Alice Springs I came upon a fruit and veg wholesaler who was prepared to get me boxes and boxes (8 X 16kg  in total) of beautiful ripe sauce tomatoes.

So yesterday was Passata Day.

We were a bit nervous about our number of bottles, the weather.. many things to be concerned about... but it happened, and joyful it was. And we ended up with over 100 bottles of beautiful red passata.  Recipe to come.

Sapote episodes - a short story

The promise of the chocolate-pudding fruit was irresistible. “Ready in two days”, the Cairns roadside vendor assured me, “when it’s soft”. I did a quick calculation of the timing of our route and figured we’d have ample time to eat the black sapote before crossing into the Northern Territory.

A few days later, as we neared the border, our fourth passenger, the black sapote, was as hard and shiny as it had been two days before.  I tried valiantly to distract my driver from the ominous quarantine road signs, but he was a law-abiding man on this occasion and pulled over at a roadside shelter armed with his pocket-knife. I thought I saw glimpses of dark treasure as the knife pierced the skin, but I was mistaken.  Instead we were faced with a green watery inedible mass and there was no hint of chocolate pudding in my first sapote experience.

My second sapote experience happened a few years later in Ho Chi Minh City on the breakfast table of the majestic Majestic Hotel.  It was the closest thing to a caramel pudding fruit I had ever tasted, this brown fruit with a fudge-like grain and the flavour of intense caramel. I returned many times to the breakfast fruit table and then bribed seven year old Jorge to return on my behalf. The memory of the fruit lingered all morning as we trudged through the humid and noisy streets into Ben Thanh Markets.  What delight as I encountered stall after stall selling this beautiful fruit, the brown sapote, peeled, sliced, bagged and ready to be eaten.

Today, I had my third sapote experience. A hard woody-skinned fruit resembling a sweet potato in size and shape, the yellow (Mamoy) sapote was on sale for $8.95/kg at Adelaide’s Central Market. Apparently there is also a white and yellow (not this yellow) sapote. Almost all the varieties come from Central and South America and are very popular in South East Asia. The Cambodian fruit stall attendant advised me that the sapote would not be ready to eat for several days, “when it’s soft”. I am due to return to Alice Springs in two days and want to avoid another disappointing sapote episode.

My senses are drawn to nearby group of people buzzing around a box of orange shiny fig-sized fruit. “Achacha”, according to the sign. This is the first year the fruit has been sold, and the achacha has become a celebrity in its own right, with its own website and television appearances. The name itself is new, derived from the original: Achachairu.  Another native of Central America, Bolivia, the achacha is covered by a shiny thick bitter skin that peels away easily to reveal a white fleshy layer around a large brown seed.  My friend, the stall-keeper, describes it as being “like a mangosteen”, not the most known of fruits. The flesh is sweet with a texture similar to custard apple but a bit more tang. I’m not disappointed, but it’s not quite the sapote pudding experience I was hoping for. Perhaps if it had been renamed: “the vanilla mousse fruit”, rather than the obscure “achacha” I might feel differently. I think I’ll buy that Mamoy sapote after all.

©  Rita Cattoni 2012

Gifts of Food.. continued..

I recently wanted to thank a friend, and her family for a very big favour.  But this friend was on a diet, as well as having an alcohol free month and my kitchen is still out of action, so I pondered what to give her.

I recalled a gift someone had given me in Yuendumu several years ago and it looked something like this:

And so I had a lovely time, buying all varieties of fruit I could lay my hands on, including: plums, nectarines, peaches, rockmelons, pears, strawberries, tangerines, grapes, passionfruit, lychees,  strawberries, tangerines, mandarins and longans...arranging them in  a box with a bit of cellophane, and the odd chocolate tucked underneath a bit of fruit for the kids.

Feedback was positive, and the only fruit the family rejected were... the longans.

A couple of tips: make sure all colours and shapes are covered, early February is a great time to do this due to the mass quantity of stone and tropical fruit available.

Valentine’s Day Sticky Rice and Mango

Photo courtesy of Paula Henry

Ingredients

1 cup of sticky rice

water

1/2 can coconut milk
1/2 teaspoon salt

2 tbsp palm sugar

2 tbsp condensed milk

toasted sesame seeds

Mango

Grated fresh coconut

Method

1.              Wash the rice in a bowl until the water runs clear.

2.              Place rice and 2 cups of water in saucepan and bring to boil.

3.              Boil from 3 minutes then strain immediately.

4.              Return pot to stove and put on a very lot heat with lid on for 10 minutes.

5.              At the same time, in another pot heat the coconut milk, salt, palm sugar and condensed milk until thick.

6.              Mix the sweet milks into the rice and stir.

7.              The rice should be thick, and the grains still intact.

8.              Pour rice onto a plate and shape into a heart.

9.              Sprinkle with toasted sesame seeds and serve with sliced mango and fresh coconut, grated.

Mangos

Photo courtesy of Paula Henry

Here in the NT, it’s the end of a blistering summer.  And while I often associate pyramids of cherries and plums and nectarines as the quintessential summer fruit, let’s not forget the less-than-humble mango.  And we have mangos in abundance and local in Central Australia.  You can buy a whole tray of Kents each Saturday from a truck at the local servo for $30.  They are grown in Ti Tree, about 100kms north of Alice Springs.  They are beautiful and fleshy, with no strings, but they’re missing something.

Mangos are a fruit that need to be smelled as well as eaten.  I have never been able to get over the scent of pesticide on mangos being sold in Australia’s fruit-fly free zone.  It is an absolute compromise, and almost worth a trip to the NT or North Queensland (or Broome) to experience a pesticide free mango. However, my most disappointing mango experience was purchasing one from an African man in the metro in Paris. I was feeling home-sick at the beginning of a European winter, and it was as far from a mango as I had ever eaten. It was one of those defining moments when I realised I needed to return to Australia.

Growing up in north Queensland, I have often found it difficult to reconcile the price of mangos in the fruit-fly free zone with the rotting mangos littering our school grounds as a child.  They may have been turpentines, a variety of I haven’t seen for years, and one with a big aroma!

There are mango groves throughout north Queensland, planted by the kidnapped South Sea Islanders who worked on the cane fields.  My mother was often finding secret groves and collecting green mangos for her annual green chutney.  Apart from a green mango, the aroma of a mango is an essential part of the eating experience.

So, we now have a glut of mangos, and they’re ripe, not green, and don’t smell as pungent as I’d like. So, what do with them?  My Italian Nonna would make a beautiful mango jam that I would eat by the spoonful, but I recently tried a new sticky rice with mango recipe and it was a big success.  The recipe came from my sister while she was in Cambodia over the Christmas break, visiting schools for orphans and taking cooking classes in her spare time.  I had previously tried to steam sticky rice Laos style, with very disappointing results.  This recipe and process is much easier and tastes great.  Thanks Pauly